How To Reduce Website’s Bounce Rate – The Definitive Guide

How to reduce the bounce rate of your website? – Tips, Tricks & Guide to reduce website’s bounce rate

Recently I was working on one of my client website (self hosted WordPress site) and came to some definite conclusions about certain ways to reduce the bounce rate of a website. Reducing bounce rate is also required for a better SEO. This website bounce rate reduction experiment was bit tough and took around 30 days for me to work on. I am jotting down the main points that I have taken care of, to reduce the bounce rate. This is an extensive to-do list for reducing website’s bounce rate.

A definitive guide and tips to reduce website’s bounce rate:

1. Know what is bounce rate for your website?

According to Google, Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. In short, it tells how many people who arrive at your website “bounce” out to another site. Keeping your bounce rate to it’s most minimal is important in making the most out of your new visitors.

So if a site has 70% bounce rate, that means 70 people out of 100 leave your site just after visiting one single page. they don’t move to see any other pages of the site. Rest 30 people click some more pages of your site. So first step is to check your bounce rate. You can get it from your Google analytics dashboard.

2. Do a research of bounce rate trend for your website

Now the next thing you need to do is testing your bounce rate for a certain timeline. This is very important to catch the trend of average bounce rate for your website. This trend varies from site to site depending upon the nature of the site.  What you can do is that divide the timeline into week, month and special occasions (such as Christmas or whenever you normally see a high traffic for your type of site). Now take a note of the average bounce rate for all these periods. Now compare them and point out the time period when your bounce rate is the lowest. Note it down. Next thing you need to check your top content for those timelines and find out the specific pages with minimum bounce rate. Note them also. The next thing you need to do is to brainstorm with these two sets of data -

a) the time period when the average bounce rate is lowest and b) the top content pages where the bounce rate is lowest.

From these two sets of data, try to find out the changes you made at that timeline and have a thorough look of your those pages with minimum bounce rate. Note down all the differences with the present homepage / internal pages/ posts. You should note down even if it is a very minor difference too. Sometimes minor differences are  major factors for bounce rate.

3. Know some obvious facts about bounce rate while considering yours:

You should be aware of some obvious facts about bounce rate before judging or concluding about yours. I am giving here a gist point by point.

- A site has a splash page intro, with only the words ‘click here’ on it. The bounce rate is likely to be very low, despite the site quality potentially very poor.

- A visitor is looking for sites selling widgets in order to find the best place to buy one online. They enter on the product page from a search query, make a note of the site and leave. The bounce rate will be high for these types of visitors.

- A visitor spends longer looking at a page than the timeout period for a visitor session. This contributes to a high bounce rate.

- The visitor has an informational query which is immediately answered by your landing page. The bounce rate will be high.

- The purpose of your site is for people to click on adsense ads, and these ads are well-targeted on your page. You want the bounce rate to be high.

- You attract a lot of traffic for a very general keyword. Only a small proportion of these visitors will be looking for your particular product or service. The bounce rate will be very high.

- Remember, high bounce rate is not always very bad depending upon the nature of your website. Google itself has a high bounce rate for their search as well as all other search engines too if the search results are relevant people will click and leave to other sites from there. It needs to be strictly interpreted within the context of a particular site.

4. Apply and test some industry-standard general tips to reduce bounce rate:

Website design changes to reduce bounce rate

1. Try to put a simple minimalistic design with lots of white space soothing to eyes. Design should be purposeful focusing only on your ‘call of action’ of your website.

2. Sequence of the features must be in accordance with the heat-map of your website. People normally first look at top left corner of your website then go to right bottom corner of page. So place important links or navigation tabs there.

3. Use standard link colors i.e blue

4. No unnecessary distraction such as blinking banner, pop up, auto play videos or widget on site.

5. Make your scrolling of the page less. Keep your sidebar clean.

6. Give users only those options that they really need. Bombarding with so many links will not be helpful as this acts as information overflow and can confuse your visitors.

7. Use medium size web friendly font – Not too small or not too big. White background and black text works best with blue links.

8. Do a browser test so that your site looks same in all major browser and in all standard screen resolutions.

Content strategy to reduce bounce rate

1. Content is king. Always write quality original articles with your own words.

2. Use catchy clear headlines, tags and titles keeping the length within 70-80 characters limit.

3. Use paragraphs, headings and bullets to provide more whitespace

4. Use uniform style throughout the post.

5. No meaningless, repeat keyword stuff in title/headlines

6. No very short post or too long posts. A 300-500 word article is good. If it’s longer than that, break it in a way (by paragraph, bullet points etc) people can grasp the concept quickly just scanning the whole post once.

7. Try to improve on your grammar and spelling

8. Write series of posts linked with each other.

9. Compile a list type of post (resource) taking the most important links of other posts of your site.

10. Use hand crafted useful post excerpts and meta data for a good search engine result snippet.

Web media strategy to reduce bounce rate

1. No heavy images. Use smart scaled image max one or two per post and must be relevant to your context

2. Use maximum one video related to your content. Mind it, these media are only to support and strengthen your original content; so these must not  over kill your actual text based content.

Linking strategy to reduce bounce rate

1. Put internal linking to your other posts by proper relevant anchor texts in a post in  balanced way. Not too less or not too much.

2. Put less external links in post. If you still need to put, then apply the setting of target=”_blank” to open them in new page or frame branding.

3. Check broken links on site. If you are using WordPress, you can do it easily by Broken link checker plugin. Also analyze your Google webmaster central guidelines (HTML issues, Crawl errors, Sitemap errors etc) thoroughly to get hint of the problem areas of your site and rectify them all.

Page speed strategy to reduce bounce rate

1. Optimize your website for fast speed and minimum loading time. This is very important to reduce bounce rate. Read my previous post on how to speed up WordPress for a detail insight.

2. Test page speed on different browser also. In my experience sometimes your site might run super fast in Google Chrome but might be slow in IE or Mozilla.

Relevancy strategy to reduce bounce rate

1. Put related posts after a post. YARPP is a good one for WordPress.

2. Direct your user what’s next after finishing the post – such as direct them to categories, popular posts or to subscribe or any other call of action you want to perform thereafter.

Analyze traffic sources to reduce bounce rate

1. From Google analytics, find out the percentage of organic search traffic, paid PPC traffic, direct visitors and reference visitors. Remember, search traffic is less patient and they are very targeted to their search query. So you need to put relevant keyword in your post rather than using generic broad search keywords. Long tail keywords play better role here. Also avoid any bad traffic. cut out the irrelevant PPC traffic and stop your campaigns for irrelevant keywords.

Interactivity strategy to reduce bounce rate

1. Place relevant polls or surveys matching to your post content

2. Add vote buttons or rate this button after post

3. Add social buttons such as facebook like, buzz, tweet after post

4. Encourage user generated content. Encourage users to comment on your post by highlighting the comment section or ending up the post with a participation line,or with  an open question, or with a debatable topic etc.

5. Offer some rewards, free Ebooks, freebies or arrange contests related to the post’s content.

6. Give option for subscription to your site. Turn your first time visitor to a subscriber by offering tactically positioned email subscription offer

Advertisement strategy to reduce bounce rate

1. Use less number of Ad blocks

2. Do not use large Ad blocks just above the page at first scroll (Unless your business is based solely on Google adsense or any other ad revenue network and you are already a good old existing publisher of them.). Blend Ad with content properly. You can put it top-left assigned with content or below after post. A header banner right after your logo will also work.

404 Error page optimization strategy to reduce bounce rate

Optimize your error pages to reduce the bounce rate. Don’t just put “Page not found” error. Be creative. Put your most popular posts or recent posts in 404 pages along with a prominent search box. Or you can put a creative error message with further direction to browse your site such as putting a site map that’s easy to follow. Also use proper 301 redirection wherever necessary.

Apply common sense to reduce  bounce rate

- Apply some common sense to reduce bounce rate. Put search box in a prominent position on site. Use ‘Go to top’ button at bottom of your post or page. Present your call of action one by one, not as a whole. For example, place social sharing buttons after post or in side of the post, next? Put related links, next? Put a custom search box or put related categories. Or fade in fade out the next post /previous post as soon as user come down to the post’s ending paragraph.  Keep post focussed to specific single topic. Also ask your friends/networkers (at least 10) for an honest feedback about your page/site and note them down to implement the most common ones to reduce bounce rate.

Follow Google Webmaster Quality guidelines to reduce bounce rate

If you have not yet read Google’s quality guideline, I would recommend you to go through that and tally your own site if it adheres them or not. Follow SEO code of ethics. Stress more on natural site build up for benefit of your user, not for search engines.

Test with Google Website Optimizer & Free Usability testing tools

Single test or multi variate test with Google website optimizer. No guess work. You’ll get a user trend specific to your type of site from the test. You can also try website usability testing free tools to lower your site’s bounce rate.

Be patient & Consistent

Bounce rate is reduced gradually. Don’t expect in one day it’ll be reduced. You need to be experimental and to be patient. Atleast after 15 days you’ll get to know any steady difference. Also you need to be consistent in website structure. Don’t change everything drastically and frequently. Slow one by one test and small incremental changes will do the major difference. If you can lower the bounce rate by 5-10%, that’s good. If your average bounce rate lies between 50-60% that’s ok. Below 40% is good. Anything below 25% is just excellent.

If you have anything more to share to reduce bounce rate, please feel free to comment here. We’ll further discuss and brainstorm on it. Good luck.

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